NineInfinity

What general area of Philly are the meetings? I'm up in King of Prussia area and might be interested if it's not too far.

Here is my school project from this quarter. We had to develop a master plan for a campus along the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia and then develop in detail the theater, open space, and gallery components. The physical concept of the project is to connect to the existing Schuylkill River path while giving students a large open space separated from the traffic and noise of the city. Metaphysically, the project represents the idea of the energy of the river entering the site and being controlled by man. Now I have to come up with an idea for a thesis project. I am hoping to do a building representative of Objectivist ideals. Right now I'm thinking a museum of science showcasing the greatness of human achievement. I'd do a skyscraper except that the scope makes it difficult to develop in-depth. Final_presentation.pdf

http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_9628639

In Philadelphia, most of the homeless are aggressive and obnoxious. I remember one of them started yelling at a kid for being racist because the kid told him to get a job. It was pretty funny. I would never outright give money to any of them simply because although I may value a human life more than 25 cents, odds are that if I give that person 25 cents he isn't going to use it rationally. I'd much rather donate that money to an organization helping them get off the street and get jobs. At least that way the money isn't going towards drugs.

I got that impression as well. I know Ayn consulted a lot with Frank Lloyd Wright before writing the book so it makes sense she would at least appreciate his aesthetics. I do not know why the film The Fountainhead seems to think that Roark is Le Corbusier. What I also appreciate from Rand is that she describes the buildings as being well-received by the users, something almost non-existent in the way most value buildings. Publications like Architectural Record take a couple pretty exterior photographs and write a piece citing how wonderful the architect's intent is without ever talking to people to see if the building actually does what it's supposed to. One other issue I was trying to contemplate was the two basic approaches to urban planning, rational and empirical. Rational is where the planner determines what he thinks the best solution for the community will be and how they can best live their lives. Empirical is the process wherein the designer asks the people living there what they want and attempts to design based on that. With the understanding that Objectivism is a very rational philosophy (in terms of judging how people ought to be instead of how they are) it seems like the empirical method would be better since in the case of urban planning the people are the end users and it's the designer's responsibility to accommodate their needs. Here is the manifesto I wrote and board I created for the class illustrating my understanding of architecture ethics.

haha yeah I should've mentioned that. I've read it twice. Rand describes the ideal client/architect relationship as one where the client tells the architect exactly what he wants and then the architect is given complete authority to create what he thinks is the best solution given the parameters. Of course in the real world clients may not know what they want and are prone to constantly changing their minds. On a related note most architects I know who've read The Fountainhead seem to completely misinterpret what Rand is saying about aesthetics. She never says that a building should be completely devoid of ornamentation (as in modernism) but rather that the ornamentation of a building should be derived from its function. Even the film version of The Fountainhead portrays Roark's buildings as being quite similar to Le Corbusier's work. The irony of course is that Corbusier was an ardent communist along with many other champions of the modernist movement. They were pushing the idea that people should live in an egalitarian decoration-free white world (see: Corbusier's plan for Paris http://www.ecosensual.net/drm/ideas/LeCorbusier1.jpg).

I am currently a year away from getting a bachelor in architecture degree and one of the graduation requirements is to take a general lecture class about ethics in architecture. The teacher is a self-proclaimed Marxist and has used the class as a means of instructing us how it is our moral duty to help poor, underprivileged people through architectural design. He also is trying to instill in us the notion that the "community" should have unlimited power in determining what gets built to make sure it's "good". I see lots of practical examples in Philadelphia where developers trying to do something better (unless you consider abandoned factories a higher value than condominiums) get stymied by the "community" who decides that better is bad because higher land values mean the poor people might lose their homes (which they obviously don't own otherwise they'd make a nice profit), or even worse, the new building might disrupt the all-important "culture" which is held as absolutely good even if it includes high violent crime and a host of other urban problems. He also keeps trying to get us to believe that the end user is far more important than the client and that the architect has more of an ethical responsibility to the end user. He told us how great it was in Sweden when they decided that an owner controlling 90% of the ownership of a factory was "bad" so they passed a law requiring that the workers get a 51% stake. I told one of my classmates that I'd burn the factory down if I were the owner Now I work at a firm where we design luxury homes for multi-millionaires on Nantucket and to me that's far more moral than any building designed for some unspecified "public benefit." My understanding of the architecture ethics is that it's a designer's responsibility to design a building solely for the maximum benefit of the client without interfering with any else's property rights (ie dumping a bunch of runoff on a neighbor's property). Any objectivist architects out there with an idea of architecture ethics? It'd be nice to have a rational discussion about the issue instead of having to hear the same commie propaganda every week.

That just makes IW even cooler. Any Objectivist should be able to appreciate the amount of talent they put into their games. Now Treyarch on the other hand, they're like looters living off IW's skill. COD5 will probably sell well even though it will suck (based on the empirical evidence of every other Treyarch COD game) simply because of the hype it'll get from COD4.

The problem I have with Libeskind is the way he treats buildings as if their sculptures with no regard to the practicality of it. It may have appealing aesthetics on the exterior, but the building has had a multitude of problems ranging from trying to hang art on sloping walls, constant leaks in the roof, and head room issues meeting ADA requirements. It's as if he assembled a jumble of random planes and then tried to stuff an art museum inside. This "outside-in" approach is where so many architects fail. From The Fountainhead I think it's clear that Rand agreed with the axiom "form follows function" in that a building can challenge one's conceptions through interesting forms only if those forms are derived from the building serving its function. An art museum certainly could arouse a particular sensation in its visitors, but it better damn well function as an art museum first.

Nothing beats the fact that he finds an interesting correlation between the Columbine massacre and its proximity to the Lockheed Martin plant in Littleton (~10 miles from the school) where they manufacture "weapons of mass destruction" (rockets to launch TV satellites). I also love how everyone in Canada apparently leaves their doors unlocked His attempted tribute to Heston now appears to be a timeline attempting to correlate Heston's stepping down from the NRA with the release of Bowling For Columbine. He is the closest representation of Ellsworth Toohey I've ever seen in the real world.

To me the book is very eye-opening in regards to how PC advocates want to label terrorists as "extremists" when a significant portion of the Middle East participates in and accepts such a hostile anti-human culture. The fact that one of her associates was murdered because she wrote a book criticizing their religion by describing real events that occurred in her life just goes to show how evil these people are. She has nothing but the utmost respect from me; it was a great book and an eye-opening one at that.